Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

a wholly imagined new taking power. Unlike eminent domain, of which it is the crazed wildling, this imagined power is both arbitrary and capricious, and has no readily perceived limitation other than the appetite of whatever legislative regime is operative at the moment. Unlike eminent domain, its scope is disciplined neither by purpose, custom, nor probity. While ostentatiously referring to a public purpose, it would serve primarily private purposes—unless downloading the latest Kate Smith song (granted, this is a bit dated) without paying for it is now deemed a public purpose, like digging the Erie Canal. And a willing contribution to the “Creative Commons” does not bestow upon the contributor or observers the moral authority to compel others to do the same.

The “Creative Commons” has in addition to its shallower roots a much deeper one, a taproot of sorts, which, after a little excavation, can be exposed to view. It is well suspected, if ignored, that money at the margin (that is, over the comfortable minimum) is neither necessary nor sufficient for happiness. Beneath the margin, it is often sufficient, though not always and not necessarily, to promote unhappiness. A large part of politics is forging the public consensus in regard to where the margin lies, even if this would be better determined privately. Inscribed by centuries of economic growth, the default position of modern societies is that the margin is a continually receding horizon. Whereas this notion itself, in contrast to the nature of our absolutely limited life span, is a cause of unhappiness, limiting it is as irrelevant to happiness as is keeping it in play of expansion. A BMW,™ an iPhone,™ or a pantry stocked by Dean & DeLuca, and everything else of that nature, ad infinitum, are neither necessary nor sufficient to make you happy.

That people believe otherwise, however, is not surprising. Those who lack any but a materialist approach to life see both acquisition and de-acquisition, fine tuned, as the keys to a blessed state. As everyone knows, the structure of our civilization promotes this. As much as they want things, they also want to do without certain others, and to parade their renunciations. One set gives them succor, the other publicizes their virtue. Life becomes a carefully balanced grocery list. This is hardly enough to fill a human heart, and so they seek more of it, getting and renouncing furiously at the same time, as if to create an equilibrium of survival.

The lust for routinizing life, welding and wedding oneself to electronic machines, entertainment, fashions, and popularities, is balanced by a countervailing “idealistic” wish for freedom, renunciation, existence without property or possessions, and so forth. Open Source, “Creative Commons,” and other rejections of or attacks upon intellectual property (the battle over real property was, for these people, lost with the end of the Cold War) are the romanticized counters to a life poisoned by rigid and inescapable materialism. But as the mere flip side of the premise they are supposed to counter, they are ineffective antidotes. When freely given they are not a solution, and when compelled from others they are simply unjust.

But they elide nicely with the dominant pieties. One of the sources of and continual sustenance for their movement is that, by and large, modern education promotes collectivism versus what it perceives as destructive, self-promoting individualism. Collaboration, collective punishment, and group responsibility are now the watchwords of the classroom. As the chairman of the Oxford History Faculty Board, Christopher Haig, recently put it: “Historians used once to work alone, reading in archives and writing in college rooms. History is now a more collaborative exercise.”21 Undoubtedly he is correct. In primary and secondary schools, writing, a naturally individual act, is now taught as such a collaborative exercise. It is often assigned to teams. Students gather and “brainstorm” (a comic-book word) to decide topics and approaches. They submit their work to what are in essence factory-floor soviets, and are bound by every manner of political inhibition and prohibition as if they were composing essays in a luxurious Vietnamese reeducation camp.

Several generations of students have been subjected to this. The preeminence of the collective was drilled into them in their earliest and most impressionable years as surely as they were made to study the same things about Martin Luther King in one grade after another, as if the worst possible fate for a child would be to forget what he had learned about Martin Luther King the year before. Intense “communitarianism” is continued through elementary and secondary education, and then nailed firmly into the wood by experts, ideologues, and lunatics in the university.

As much as civilization depends upon individual rights and freedoms, it depends upon collective action as well. Imagine a farm in a cove on the coast of Normandy in the year 700. Without collective action and community it would have been static unto this day, without—to draw, for example, from some of the “m” words made possible by collaboration—manufactures, medicine, museums, monasteries, movies, machines, and Mont Saint-Michel. A prehistoric stasis would have certain wonderful and humane advantages—a closed world running on the clock of nature, gentle in pace and expectation—as well as uncomfortable and mortally dangerous drawbacks: seaborne raiders, infectious diseases, starvation. One would see the constellations and feel their mystery ever so deeply, but without the slightest understanding of what they really are. It is all a question of balance.

And in that regard, what we tend to forget is that, whatever the equation, collective action should be the servant of individual thought, persons, and needs, and not their master as is so often the case. Having helped to give birth to civilization, community is also capable of smothering it in regimenting the life of the individual rather than in submitting to the direction of its genius; in relieving (though falsely and ineffectively) the individual of responsibility to himself and those immediately around him by creating a demanding obligation to invisible others and the state; in encouraging conformity; in the dehumanization of customs